Reports of three deaths from hantavirus on a cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean are igniting fears of another pandemic. Health experts, however, are cautioning against panic, as hantavirus, a disease spread by rodents, is much different from COVID-19 — which, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) killed more than 7 million people worldwide (including 1 million in the United States alone). COVID-19, according to health experts, is spread much more quicky and easily.

Salon's Troy Farah, however, is arguing that the hantavirus deaths are a major wake-up call for President Donald Trump and his administration — and they're dropping the ball.

"The fact that the outbreak was on a cruise ship, one of the first places COVID-19 started to spread back in early 2020, is giving tons of people déjà vu," Farah explains in an article. "But besides both being viruses, the similarities between SARS-CoV-2 and hantavirus actually aren't close. They infect in different ways and are classed in entirely different phylums, meaning they are not remotely related. Furthermore, hantavirus has been around for decades, it is not spread quickly or easily between people — and those who catch it display symptoms, unlike COVID, which can spread between folks unknowingly. The WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention both report that the current risk to the global population from this event is low."

Farah emphasizes, however, that the United States "will almost certainly experience another pandemic from some highly infectious pathogen in the next 10 years or less" —and MAGA Republicans are dropping the ball by not thinking about preparedness. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, for example, tweeted, "Don’t comply. This time, just don't," while others are falsely claiming that ivermectin can be used to treat hantavirus.

"While hantavirus isn't a huge concern to me right now — and many public health experts seem to agree — I am worried about what comes down the line," Farah warns. " I wouldn't be surprised if people didn't take basic precautions during the next pandemic. No flattening the curve, no masking in crowds, just letting some brutal disease rip through us, as if arrogance and resentment can stop infectious disease — a strategy somehow even less effective than ivermectin!"

The Supreme Court has been widely criticized for its perceived partisanship, with the six Republican judges (including three appointed by President Donald Trump) overturning precedents from Roe v. Wade to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Yet according to one of Trump’s judges, this is not a problem because being on America’s most powerful bench “isn’t a popularity contest.”

“The judicial branch, it isn't a popularity contest, right?” Justice Neil Gorsuch told Reason’s Nick Gillespie in a podcast that dropped on Monday. Gillespie mentioned that Americans are losing faith in the Supreme Court during a larger interview about Gorsuch’s recent children’s book, “Heroes of 1776.”

“I mean, actually as we talk about in the book, one of the major grievances that the colonists had was that they didn't have independent judges,” Gorsuch continued. “They had politicized the judges and they wanted no part of that, right? And you wouldn't hire a judge to write the laws for the country. That's not self-rule. But you would hire a life-tenured judge who didn't care what anybody had thought about his decisions.”

Gorsuch added that he believes the Supreme Court is doing “pretty darn well” in serving as a model for the rest of the country, particularly when it comes to being civil with individuals with whom you disagree.

“You give us the 70 hardest cases in the country, okay?” Gorsuch said. “Now we only take the cases where the lower court judges have disagreed. That's our job is to resolve their disagreements. By and large, that's our daily fare.” He then claimed that even though he is a self-described “originalist” while a liberal judge, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, is more progressive, they remain friends.

“I'm never gonna persuade her, she's never gonna persuade me,” Gorsuch said. “We know that that's part of our job. We accept that lawyers and judges acknowledge there's disagreement. That's the nature of our profession. But we can be friends and I think we're doing a pretty good job.”

While Gorsuch claimed that he and Sotomayor are friends, in 2022 NPR reported a rumored rift between the two over the conservative’s refusal to adhere to COVID-19 protocols. Sotomayor, who has diabetes, is in a vulnerable population when it comes to potentially serious complications from a COVID-19 infection. In response to the omicron outbreak at the time, Chief Justice John Roberts reportedly asked all of the judges to wear masks at hearings. Gorsuch refused to do so, and because he is seated next to Sotomayor, the latter refrained from attending in-person hearings.

“On Wednesday, Sotomayor and Gorsuch issued a statement saying that she did not ask him to wear a mask,” NPR reported at the time. “NPR's report did not say that she did. Then, the chief justice issued a statement saying he ‘did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other justice to wear a mask on the bench.’ The NPR report said the chief justice's ask to the justices had come ‘in some form.’”

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman calls right-wing politics “deadly” — and predicts that “MAGA Will Kill Many Americans,” by the thousands, driven by greed and willful ignorance.

Krugman goes one step further, arguing outright that this is not by accident:

“Does MAGA want to see thousands of Americans die prematurely from smoking and refusal to get vaccinated? Yes,” he writes.

He argues that the right’s decades-long opposition to health care is driven by greed, especially from “wealthy donors unwilling to pay taxes to help others in need.”

Krugman points to Tuesday’s decision by Trump’s FDA to allow blueberry and mango-flavored vapes, which critics warn will increase use among the young.

Why?

“Trump is reportedly hoping that support for vaping will win back support from young men,” Krugman writes — a constituency the president has been losing during his second term in office.

There’s also the recent decision, again by Trump’s FDA, to block the release of studies finding the COVID-19 and shingles vaccines safe, with side effects rare.

“Beyond this,” he continues, “right-wing politics in America often goes hand in hand with hostility to science in general and medical science in particular. The deadly linkage between reactionary politics and rejection of science was obvious during the Covid pandemic.”

Krugman also implicates greed in the anti-vaccine movement, saying that “quack medicine is big business.”

“Right-wing radio and social media have long relied on peddlers of snake oil for a large part of their revenue. So much of the attack on medical science can be seen as financially motivated,” he writes.

Ideological willful ignorance plays a part as well — driven by the alliance between oligarchs and white Christian nationalism, the latter of which is “deeply hostile to Enlightenment values, modern science very much included.”

To prove his point, Krugman points to the widely-reported resurgence of measles, that was seen as eliminated from the United States decades ago, thanks to vaccines. Now, many parents are choosing to forego vaccinating their children against this highly contagious and potentially deadly disease.

He adds to that the refusal of many red states to expand Medicaid, a program largely paid for by the federal government under the Affordable Care Act.

The data bear him out. Life expectancy in “Trump-leaning” states trails blue states significantly.

There’s “a strong, clear negative correlation between Trump-leaning orientation and low life expectancy at the state level,” Krugman writes. “Deep red states like Alabama and West Virginia have life expectancy comparable to, say, Kazakhstan.”

President Donald Trump’s choice to lead America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon who gained international attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for his opposition to vaccine mandates. On paper, Makary seems like a great choice for the job, but a conservative newspaper is reporting “soap opera”-level drama associated with his tenure.

“Has any Trump administration official caused more political headaches for the president than Marty Makary?” wrote Allysia Finley of The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. “His Food and Drug Administration has turned into a soap opera, with real lives hanging in the balance.”

To illustrate this point, Finley described how "in public interviews, [Makary] boasts about accelerating access to gene therapies and rare-disease drugs, even as he and his deputies block them." Describing Makary as “slicker than a pharmaceutical salesman,” the Journal reporter observed that “my sources say that patience with Dr. Makary is wearing thin among Republicans in Congress and White House officials."

Since taking office, Makary has rejected rare-disease and cancer drugs, a gene therapy for Huntington’s Disease and various other medicines that had demonstrably improved or even saved lives. He has also been accused of allowing conflicts of interest to override his detached clinical judgment.

“Members of Congress are also investigating whistleblower complaints of retaliation by agency leadership against FDA staff who have recommended approvals of drugs with which Dr. Makary and his left-hand man, Vinay Prasad, disagreed,” Finley reported. “Dr. Prasad is a Bernie Sanders acolyte whom the commissioner tapped to lead the FDA’s biologics and gene-therapy division.”

Finley also quoted a Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, as saying that “the stories are so outrageous. It just appears that they're looking for excuses to say no." Johnson also reported rumors that the FDA has kept a “blacklist” of companies that “make too much noise.”

Finely concluded, "It's time for Mr. Trump to pull the plug on the Makary show."

Although not mentioned in her editorial, the FDA is also under fire for seeming to pull back from its responsibilities to protect food. Under Makary’s tenure, the FDA announced it would no longer engage in routine food inspections, describing that job as superfluous and instead arguing federal inspectors should offload all of those responsibilities to local authorities.

"There's so much work to go around. And us duplicating their work just doesn't make sense," a former FDA official explained to CBS News at the time.

The FDA has also been criticized for incorrectly saying that COVID vaccines have caused child deaths, a policy that Dr. Celine Grounder of KFF Health News denounced for allegedly endangering the public.

“What is unfolding inside the FDA is not a narrow dispute over covid vaccines,” Grounder argued. “It is an attempt, according to critics and vaccine scientists, to rewrite the rules governing the entire U.S. vaccine system — how risks are weighed, how benefits are proved, and how quickly lifesaving shots reach the public.”

Grounder concluded, “Former agency leaders warn that if these changes take hold, the consequences could be lasting: fewer vaccines, slower updates, weakened public trust, and more preventable outbreaks.”

By many accounts, during his first term, President Donald Trump botched the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the latest hantavirus outbreak has some worrying the same thing could happen again if there is another Trump pandemic.

Miles Taylor, the Department of Homeland Security Chief of Staff during the first Trump administration is out with a stern warning, offering three reasons why Americans “won’t survive another Trump pandemic.”

Under President Trump, the U.S. response to COVID resulted in far higher infection rates and rates of death than many other high-income nations. The Guardian in 2021 reported that the U.S. could have avoided 40 percent of COVID deaths.

“Trump won’t just mishandle the next global health crisis,” he’s “prepared to weaponize it,” Taylor warns.

The “worst thing” about Trump’s “first turn at pandemic management isn’t just that Trump failed. Rather, it’s that he failed so spectacularly that he learned all the wrong lessons.”

“Trump broke the pandemic response system,” says Taylor. “And it remains broken.”

Trump threw out existing pandemic response plans, and instead convened “a hastily assembled White House ‘task force,’ made the HHS secretary chair it, then handed it to the vice president, then handed shadow control to his son-in-law.”

Congressional investigations “found that the result was chaos and structural collapse, as agencies scrambled to reinvent pandemic response on the fly,” says Taylor, who relays one example from his time at DHS.

“I remember the phone calls at the time. My friend Olivia Troye, who was helping Vice President Mike Pence run the task force from the inside, would call with a tone of contained terror,” he writes.

“It’s so broken, Miles. You have no idea. He’s getting people killed,” she told him.

The interagency structure remains broken to this day, and the people who were “supposed to save our lives” have been purged from the government workforce.

Calling the situation “dire,” Taylor explains the bodycount.

“Last year, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced cuts of 10,000 employees on top of probationary firings that hit pandemic preparedness offices directly,” he writes. “The CDC lost roughly 2,400 staff — about 18 percent of its workforce. The FDA lost 3,500. The NIH lost 1,200. Entire offices that investigate disease outbreaks, manage infectious disease response, and collect surveillance data were then eliminated in a Friday-night massacre during the government shutdown.”

Going forward, those who are being replaced are political hires with less experience.

“So when the next pathogen emerges and the president asks for advice,” Taylor says, “the room probably won’t contain Tony Faucis and Deb Birxs, however imperfect they were. More likely, it will contain podcasters and quacks and vaccine skeptics — and maybe a few terrified careerists.”

It gets worse.

During the next pandemic, “Trump will be motivated by ‘revenge’ rather than ‘response,'” Taylor writes, noting that FEMA has become part of Trump’s “revenge machine.”

If you live in a blue state, you are three times less likely to receive federal disaster assistance than if you live in a red state. Citing analysis, Taylor says that out of 106 federal disaster relief requests, Republican-leaning states received 101 approvals, Democratic-leaning states only five.

Taylor warns that Trump “is always hunting for leverage. What better leverage to hold over a Democratic governor than the lives of his or her constituents?”

“Vaccines, antivirals, ventilators, federal medical teams, surge capacity — all of it can be released quickly… or held back indefinitely,” he writes. “You want help for your people? Play ball, he might say. Agree to join my mass-deportation plan or hand over your voter rolls.”

“The cost would be mass graves. And that would give Trump a lot of leverage, indeed.”

Which brings Taylor to his very specific warning to blue states: prepare for the next pandemic now, and prepare as if there will be no help from the federal government.

“Plan for it like the feds will be a foe,” he warns.

Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, is boasting that rising consumer spending — including on gasoline — proves the economy is thriving, even as Americans put those costs on their credit cards.

“And so the consumer is really, really firing on all cylinders, just like the corporate sector you’re seeing in the earnings reports, and they’re doing that because they have so much more money in their pockets,” Hassett told Fox Business.

Bragging that “credit card spending is through the roof,” Hassett said, “They’re spending more on gasoline, but they’re spending more on everything else, too.”

The data shows a different story.

Polls show that the majority of Americans are worried about their finances, more now than at any time in decades.

Late last month, Gallup reported that 55 percent of Americans say their finances are getting worse.

“That percentage is the highest Gallup has recorded since it began asking Americans about their finances in 2001, showing consumers are less optimistic than they were during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the Great Recession in 2008,” CBS News reported.

Since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January 2025, Americans are paying roughly 45% more for gas — with the national average hitting $4.53 per gallon today, per AAA, up from $3.13 that week.

“Almost 3 in 10 Americans now have less savings than they did a year ago, and for many, the safety net they once relied on is already gone,” reports MoneyWise. “According to a recent DepositAccounts survey, 37% of Americans have less than $500 set aside, and nearly half (45%) wouldn’t be able to cover more than a month of essential expenses if their income stopped.”

Consumer confidence in the U.S. has continued to plunge under President Donald Trump's watch, and according to a new report from The Hill, it has now reached a grim milestone that once poisoned the presidency of the predecessor that Trump despises.

On Friday, Gallup released the latest edition of its Economic Confidence Index, a widely cited measure of the American public's sense of how well the economy is going. The news could hardly have been worse for the president: consumer confidence cratered to negative 45 points in May, a drop of 7 points since the last index report in April.

These are the lowest confidence numbers from Gallup since October 2022, when consumers were reeling from the historic inflation caused by the continued fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, when gas prices skyrocketed just as they are now. The report did, however, note that sentiments remain higher than they were in the immediate aftermath of these issues taking hold in June 2022, for now.

That record inflation heavily tainted voters' perceptions of President Joe Biden, sending his economic and overall approval ratings into a tailspin that neither he nor his vice president, Kamala Harris, was able to recover from, paving the way for Trump's reelection. Trump and his administration allies are quick to blame any and all of his shortcomings on the issues they were supposedly left with from Biden, but now, the data shows that he appears to be digging himself into the same hole.

Trump is also contending with the fact that many of the biggest economic headwinds are of his own creation, including the chaos wrought by his tariff agenda and his war with Iran, and voters are increasingly likely to lay the blame for their financial misfortunes directly with him. Biden, meanwhile, was largely reacting to forces outside of his control, even if voters found those responses lacking.

"Only 16 percent of U.S. adults rated economic conditions as excellent or good, compared to nearly half who said conditions are poor," The Hill explained. "About one-third, or 34 percent, rated economic conditions as 'only fair,' according to the survey. The share of Americans who believe the economy is in good shape is now at its lowest level since April 2023, Gallup noted."

It continued: "Meanwhile, roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults also think economic conditions are getting worse rather than getting better. That figure has grown steadily throughout the year and is now at its highest point since May 2023. The data underscores how the war in Iran is affecting the way Americans feel about the current economic situation, as rising consumer and fuel prices squeeze their household budgets."

President Donald Trump is set on going to battle against one of Congress's most powerful women, and according to anonymous sources who spoke to The Hill, a growing number of Republican senators are ready to get in line at his demand.

Trump this week demanded that the Senate remove its current parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, from her position after she shot down one of his biggest demands. The parliamentarian's duties include interpreting which provisions can legally be included in reconciliation bills crafted by the chamber, and recently, MacDonough ruled that $1 billion in taxpayer funds could not be earmarked for Trump's ballroom, sending him into a rage.

Despite his demands, Trump is largely powerless to do anything about MacDonough without support from senators. That might not be an issue for long, however, as anonymous sources close to the situation revealed to The Hill that support for ousting the parliamentarian is growing among GOP senators, with some going so far as to suggest her firing is long overdue.

“The fire-the-parliamentarian group is growing. There are quite a few members now who are saying, ‘We should have fired her day one,’” one anonymous Senate Republican told the outlet.

Another source, described as a "senior Senate GOP aide," also confirmed this growing anger among lawmakers, citing the "roadblocks" that MacDonough's rulings have created for the passage of Trump's ballroom funding and his much-demanded SAVE Act.

“I do think she should be fired. A large portion of the conference thinks that,” the senior aide said. “It’s very strong among the MAGA crowd."

Another anonymous senior aide, however, dumped a bit of cold water on the idea of ousting MacDonough, calling the idea "wishcasting” done by some of the president's "staunchest Senate allies." They also argued that many of MacDonough's rulings over the years have been completely fair.

“She’s been fair even if she doesn’t agree with everything you argue,” the aide said.

Appointed to the role back in 2012, MacDonough has made several rulings throughout her tenure that have also run afoul of Democrats and their biggest policy goals. In 2021, while Joe Biden was president and Democrats held both chambers of Congress, she ruled that a COVID-19 relief package could not include an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15. She also later ruled that a reconciliation bill could not implement a new policy creating a pathway to legal status for certain undocumented immigrants.

Ohio proved itself more of a red state after Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown failed to retain his seat in 2024. And along with Brown losing to Republican businessman Bernie Moreno, President Donald Trump won the rust belt state by 11 points.

But that was then, said MS NOW writer Hunter Woodall. Today U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, tapped to replace Vice President J.D. Vance in the Senate, is running to keep the seat through the end of the term in 2028, but Democrats are overperforming with the curmudgeonly Trump at the top of the Republican Party and fuel prices and a weak economy dragging down Republicans and their Congressional and White House trifecta.

“There’s no doubt that having Sherrod Brown at the top of the ticket makes a huge difference for Democrats’ ability to compete this cycle,” state House Democratic Leader Dani Isaacsohn said.

The Ohio Capitol Journal reports Brown outpaces Ohio Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted in fundraising.

“Brown brought in more than $7.3 million in direct contributions and transfers from other committees. With a nudge from joint fundraising groups, that total swells to $8.8 million. Meanwhile, Husted raised a little more than $1.5 million between direct donations and transfers from joint committees,” reports the Journal. “Brown has almost $10 million in the bank, while Husted has just shy of $6 million.”

Additionally, the Journal reports the bulk of Brown’s contributions come from individual, small dollar donations through the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue with Brown raising more than $2 million through the organization in the final few months of 2025. Brown’s campaign claims an average donation of about $54 and notes 18,640 donors made contributions for the first time.

And Brown is not the only Ohio hope Democrats are baiting. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is term-limited, the party sees an opening for Dr. Amy Acton, who served as DeWine’s director of the Ohio Department of Health during the Covid-19 pandemic, to win the governorship, said Woodall.

“In the short term … political gravity and a midterm cycle shaped by Trump’s second term and frustrations about the cost of living may help [Democrats] overcome the kind of messaging woes that last lost them control in Washington,” said Woodall.

Still, Republicans are trying to stay hopeful, said Woodall. “While Brown being on the ballot has created at least a level of anxiety among Republicans, there’s still confidence within GOP circles that the state’s red hue will remain.”